Friday, 11 September 2015

Briefly: A New Species of Human Ancestor Found in South Africa

An international team of scientists led by Lee
R. Berger, has discovered a new species of humans, in South Africa.

The discovery was made in a cave chamber where about
a thousand human fossils appeared to have been buried over a million years.The new specie was named 'Homo naledi' meaning ‘the
caves where the bones lay for so long’. The discovery suggests that some early
hominins intentionally deposited bodies of their dead in a remote and large
cave chamber that couldn’t be accessed.

So far the team has
recovered parts of at least 15 individuals that lived 1.78 million to 1.95
million years ago.